The Continuing Story of Bob Gray
by Joncal
Summary: Follows the book, NOT the movie. Set several years in the future, all the Losers have passed on, with the exception of eighty-five year-old Mike Hanlon ... Pennywise returns and begins haunting a new generation of children. Shitty description -.-
1. Chapter 1

Today, when I woke up this morning, I saw something that scared me quite badly.

I haven't been scared in quite some time … not even when Bobby McFadden and his redneck football buddies got liquored up and wrote DEATH TO NIGGERS across the windshield of my Honda. They'd been leaving hateful, threatening notes in my mailbox for quite some time. Usually they were short and sweet, done in a scrawling handwriting reminiscent of a small child's. Some of the colorful phrases were YOUR MOTHER SUCKS COCK ON FORTY-SECOND STREET and DERRY HATES NIGGERS, YES IT'S TRUE, WE'RE GONNA BEAT YOUR BLACK ASS TILL IT'S BLACK _AND_ BLUE!

Why Bobby _(Henry) _chooses to pick on an eighty-five year-old man who hasn't done jack shit to him is beyond me. I've spent many a sleepless night wondering this. He and his shitkicking friends Marc and Percy _(Belch and Victor)_ are walking, talking, snuff-chewing proof that racism is alive and well. Funny, considering as a youngster I'd always believed it would just 'go away' when I grew up. Schools and restaurants can be unsegregated, but you can't force a man to change the way he feels.

Like how I can't force myself to stop being so goddamn afraid.

There were a bunch of balloons tied around the post of my mailbox; big, shiny balloons, all colors, bobbing listlessly against the early morning breeze. My eyes are nothing like they used to be; to be blunt I'm blinder than a bat stuck in a mineshaft at midnight, but I could see and read the words written on the sides of the balloons quite clearly.

**HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MIKEY! WHEN ARE YOU GONNA KEEL OVER, YOU OLD FART?**

At first I told myself it was just another, _had _to be another message from the McFadden crew, until I read the other part of it.

**HUGS, KISSES, BEST OF WISHES, YOUR CHUM PENNYWISE THE CLOWN.**

That couldn't be what it said.

All at once, a wave of memories came flooding back, none of them good. I remembered hiding in a smokestack at the remains of the Kitchener Ironworks, throwing moldy bits of tile at _(Rodan) _some sort of bird. I remembered being chased down by the thuggish Bowers brigade and humiliated. I felt sick, and out of nowhere, I started to cry. Through tears I glanced at a pudgy figure clad in a stained wife-beater and dirty slacks standing on the edge of the road. Big red pompom buttons ran down the front of his shirt, all the way down to the pee-stained crotch of his pants. The man, whom I did not recognize at first as the late Butch Bowers, grinned at me through a pair of clenched and steadily-eroding teeth. He waggled his sausage-like fingers at me, almost like we were old lovers, and threw his head back in a fit of laughter.

He came to a sputtering, breathless stop, looked back over at me, and winked, slyly.

"_How ya doing, Mikey_?" the apparition inquired, half-croaking and half-slurring. "_I ain't seen you in a coon's age! You know, you're pretty old. Might drop dead any day now, hell, maybe any minute! So why don't you just come with me, so you can get it over with and float! You can finally float, Mikey. Your friends are still down there. They're waiting for you … for you to come float with them_."

"I wouldn't come with you, ya ole bugger, not even for a looksee of yer momma's _twat_!" I burst out, in a near-flawless imitation of Richie's Irish Cop voice. As the word _twat_ escaped my mouth, my next-door neighbor, Rosie Drakerson, glanced over at me. Rosie was a kind soul; about forty year younger than I. She would check on me from time to time to make sure I was okay, that my ticker was still ticking, bake and bring me pies even though I was a Type 2 diabetic. She was out tending her azaleas, and she had been watering them when I yelled out an obscenity straight from the mind of Richie 'Trashmouth' Tozier.

Butch seemed a bit unfazed. He lowered his face, and mumbled something under his breath. I heard him say, _"If you don't get out of town, you _will _float, I promise you that. I dropped by to wish you a happy birthday, and to give you a warning … Get out of Derry, Mikey."_

Butch glared at me. Only it wasn't the frenzied mug of that nut Bowers. It was George Denbrough. George Denbrough, Stuttering Bill's little brother, who had been found lying near a storm drain, choking on murky brown rainwater, with a stub of bone poking out of the stump where his right arm had once been.

His face, horribly pale and out of place on Butch's body, dripped with mud. Bits of leaves and mud clung wetly in his hair. His eyes were nothing more than ragged black sockets.

George smiled at me. I went inside and locked my door. I haven't been out since.

There's a storm coming, and I can't stop it. The Losers, they've all passed on. And me, well, I'm too goddamn old to be out hunting for monsters. I pray to God that there's somebody out there who can stop It … some other gang of Losers? I hope.

Only time will tell. And if my hunches are right, Derry doesn't have much time left at all.


	2. Charlie

**1**

The building that served as Derry's junior high school was big, bleak, and grayer than the overcast on this particular afternoon. To Bobby McFadden, it had always reminded him of a prison, a place his father would be spending his remaining days.

Gerald McFadden was doing time for holding up a $av-A-Lot! in Bangor about a month or so before his son was born. All in all, Bobby's old man got away with an impressive sum of forty-nine dollars and sixty-two cents, about three dozen packs of Camels (Bob himself preferred Marlboros ) and a couple packs of Budweiser. Security camera footage led the elder McFadden's arrest barely a week later.

Nobody, including Bobby, had heard from him since. He often wondered why he never wrote his family, how life was in the big house, and if he ever dropped the soap. Bobby supposed he felt some sort of affection for his father, but since he had actually never loved anything, he couldn't say for sure. McFadden and Camp, as Marc Campton was referred to by what little companions he had, had been waiting for that little scug Charlie Patterson for over an hour now. He was an eighth grader, scrawny and gawky, with one eye that didn't _jibe. _

McFadden glanced at his watch, despite the fact that he couldn't quite read it. He guessed it was two-forty-five, when it was only one-seventeen, and signalled for Camp to get his rear in gear and get in the alleyway behind Bergen's Clothing Store. Charlie passed Bergen's everyday on his way home from school. The plan was to ambush the scroungy little fuck and beat him till he hollered uncle.

"Go on," Bobby instructed.

"It's not even close to two-o'-clock yet," Camp protested in that annoying whining voice that was so common with Derry's upper-class tweens-and-teens. He folded his arms over his considerable chest, which had earned him the nickname 'Tits'.

"It is so, now get your fat ass in the alley."

Why argue?

Bobby was about to give Tits a good kick in the bum for walking too slow, when he noticed something out of the corner of his eye.

Something small. And round.

Red.

A ball?

He pulled a trash-can aside, crouched for a better look at whatever lay between a stack of yellowed newspapers and a beer bottle, and gasped so quietly he himself did not hear it.

A red button?

Like the ones on those fruity suits clowns wore.

Suddenly, he remembered what had happened to him last March, but just as soon as the thought came shooting up from his subsonscious, Tits cried, "Is that a cop car?"

Bobby glanced over his shoulder. Just a white Caddy with the windows down.

He turned and gave Tits a good whack. "Even if it was, we ain't doing anything illegal."

"Loitering is illegal."

Bobby didn't care. He knew how to handle cops. He would just

(_lie em up_)

feed them some phony story and get away with whatever he'd done, without so much as a smack on the wrist.

(_who lied em up, daddy?_)

Which is why he thought that he'd be able to get away with what he really planned to do to Charlie Patterson.

He looked back down at the button, or whatever it was, and kicked it aside.

**2**

As Mrs. Lutz droned on about some nameless battle in some nameless point in time, Charlie stared at the back of Willow Marsten's head. He watched with a fascination one could consider either adorable or just plain odd with every bob of her ponytail, being sure to glance at the paper on his desk had she turned in his direction. It wasn't likely; she'd never so much as smiled at him in the three years they'd had classes together.

Charlie didn't mind.

He guessed he liked her, but he didn't consider it a crush. He felt that he was genuinely in love with her. He didn't know a whole lot about her, other than that she was reputed to be loose. Charlie guessed that this was only because she was more physically developed than the rest of the girls in her class. I'm guessing you know how nasty girls can be. One rumor gets started, and your reputation goes to Shit City. One loudmouth named Kurt Bordeaux told a tale nothing short of unflattering describing how Willow gave ten-dollar blowjobs in the boy's bathroom after school. "Only on Fridays, though," Kurt had been sure to point out.

Had he been a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier, Charlie would've socked that trash-mouthed geek right then and there. But he wasn't, so nobody spent the rest of their afternoon picking up their had been at lunch, about a month ago. Kurt had gotten a good share of beatings since then; he never knew when to shut up. Just last week he had run afoul of that big galoot Bobby McFadden. As much as he disliked Kurt (who oddly reminded Charlie of _somebody _from a_ long time ago_, a _really_ long time ago), he couldn't help but feel bad for him. He'd gone home with a busted nose, a black eye, and three chipped teeth.

But then again, there wasn't much Charlie could have done.

Bobby was NOT somebody you picked a fight with. Ever.

It was Kurt's own damned fault. Shoulda just kept his trap shut. But he couldn't, as I've already said, and took his lumps like a little pansy.

Hardy-har-har.

Charlie had been absently goggling the way lovesick saps do when within poking distance of the center of their affection when the bell sounded, annoucning the end of another "fun-filled day", as Principal Marsh was fond of saying. Children flooded out almost immediately, while Charlie, embarrassed and ashamed that he'd developed a hard-on, slowly gathered his books and rose to his feet and waited for the room to . Lutz, a middle-aged woman who looked neither pretty nor pleasant, gave the boy a glance, and before she could ask him to leave, Charlie scurried out, unaware that he was scurrying into the worst afternoon of his life.


End file.
